{"id":57302,"date":"2026-07-24T16:43:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T16:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/cairngorms-wildfire-smoke-blows-into-aberdeen-59-miles-away\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T16:43:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T16:43:45","slug":"cairngorms-wildfire-smoke-blows-into-aberdeen-59-miles-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/cairngorms-wildfire-smoke-blows-into-aberdeen-59-miles-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Cairngorms wildfire smoke blows into Aberdeen &#8211; 59 miles away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sandy McCook, chairman of Nethy Community Council, said he had witnessed a &#8220;major flare-up&#8221; on Mam Suim, Craig nan Gall and into Strath Nethy on Thursday evening.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said: &#8220;The wind has picked up considerably and turned to a more westerly direction driving the fire eastwards.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He told BBC Scotland News: &#8220;It has had a huge impact in the village. People are on edge. They&#8217;re on tenterhooks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They don&#8217;t know quite what&#8217;s happening especially when they&#8217;re seeing one thing on the ground and the agencies are putting out a different message.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He added: &#8220;We haven&#8217;t had the air support that that we need. The other thing that would have made a huge difference would be if the government had declared a state of emergency or a critical incident.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We could then have had the use of military assets.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said he felt &#8220;sick to the pit of his stomach&#8221; at the situation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">First Minister John Swinney told the BBC he was keeping the fire &#8220;under very close review&#8221; and was speaking to the fire service as things develop.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said some of the measures put in place such as firebreaks were under &#8220;significant pressure&#8221; as a result of changing weather conditions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We will be undertaking a review of this incident because it&#8217;s an illustration&#8230; that the climate is creating different circumstances for us to manage and we&#8217;ve got to be confident we&#8217;ve got the resources in place,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Cairngorms National Park covers 1,748 sq miles (4,527 sq km) and includes parts of five local authorities &#8211; Aberdeenshire, Angus, Highland, Moray and Perth &amp; Kinross.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Closed and restricted areas include paths around Glenmore, Loch Morlich and Badaguish, as well as low-level routes including the Old Logging Way and routes providing access to Cairngorm Mountain, the Northern Corries, Meall A&#8217; Bhuachaille, the Green Loch (Lochan Uaine), Strath Nethy or Bynack More.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Paths within Abernethy Forest to the south of Forest Lodge towards Ryvoan Bothy also remain closed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c20d1np80gqo?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sandy McCook, chairman of Nethy Community Council, said he had witnessed a &#8220;major flare-up&#8221; on Mam Suim, Craig nan Gall and into Strath Nethy on Thursday evening. He said: &#8220;The wind has picked up considerably and turned to a more westerly direction driving the fire eastwards.&#8221; He told BBC Scotland News: &#8220;It has had a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[609,16100,7400,6579,6604,1564],"class_list":["post-57302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scotland","tag-aberdeen","tag-blows","tag-cairngorms","tag-miles","tag-smoke","tag-wildfire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57304,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57302\/revisions\/57304"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}